Dave Barry Learns Everything You Need to Know About Being a Husband From Reading 50 Shades of Grey

You need to have an honest, no-holds-barred conversation about sex with the special woman in your life — provided you're a superhot billionaire

who can move without being seen

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“Did you give him our address?”

“No, but stalking is one of his
specialties,” I muse matter-of-factly.

Kate’s brow knits further.

That’s right: This is the kind of a
book where, instead of saying things, characters muse them, and they are
somehow able to muse them matter-of-factly. And these
matter-of-fact musings cause other characters’ brows—which of course were
already knitted—to knit still further. The book is over five
hundred pages long and the whole thing is written like that. If Jane Austen
(another bestselling female British author) came back to life and read this
book, she would kill herself.

So why did I read it? I read it
because, as a man with decades of experience in the field of not knowing what
the hell women are thinking, I was hoping this book would give me some answers.
Because a lot of women LOVED this book. And they didn’t just read it; they
responded to it by developing erotic feelings—feelings so powerful that in some
cases they wanted to have sex with their own husbands.

I know that sounds like crazy talk,
but I have firsthand confirmation of this phenomenon from my friend Ron, who is
married to my wife’s cousin Sonia, a woman. Ron states: “While Sonia was
reading the book, I was getting more action than Wilt Chamberlain.”

Another friend of mine whose name I
will keep confidential out of respect for his privacy[*] told
me, “I’d be lying on the bed watchingSportsCenter, and she’d be reading
that book and suddenly, WHOA.”

So what kind of book is Fifty
Shades of Grey? I would describe it, literary genre–wise, as “a porno
book.” But it’s not the kind of porno men are accustomed to. When a man reads
porno, he does not want to get bogged down in a bunch of unimportant details
about the characters, such as who they are or what they think. A man wants to
get right to the porno:

Chapter One

Bart Pronghammer walked into the
hotel room and knitted his brow at the sight of a naked woman with breasts like
regulation volleyballs.

“Let’s have sex,” she mused
matter-of-factly.

A few paragraphs later they’re all
done, and the male reader, having invested maybe ninety seconds of his time,
can put the book down and go back to watching SportsCenter.